On Mon, 29 May 2000, Alexandre Oberlin wrote about, Re: clueless with disk problem -
Solution !:
> Hi again,
>
> I've backed up, repartitioned and restored, and BTW I think I now
> clearly
> see where the error came from. I am surprised that not many people seem
> to have made the same mistakes than I did, (though the problem might be
> latent until far cylinders of the disk get allocated). It seems to be a
> wide open trap with disks over 8.4 Gb. I will try to make it clear so
> that it could avoid unnecessary troubles to linux newcomers.
Well most recent BIOS's will assign such a disk differently as you have
your defined.
I have a scsi 9.2gb disk, my BIOS is set to autodetect the disk, the disk
parms are;
Disk /dev/sda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1115 cylinders
>
> The problem is that fdisk doesn't let you allocate more than 1024
> cylinders / 256 heads / 64 sectors. This is the famous 8.4 Gb (24 bits)
> limit (see http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html)
> I used fdisk 2.8, the one coming with RedHat 5.2, and I don't know
> however if more recent versions of fdisk overcome this, since the newer
> one I downloaded lately said "segmentation fault" and exited...
I think this may relate to you having MSDOS on you H/D, if the disk is
Linux only then there should be no problem, at least according to 'man
fdisk', however cfdisk is said to be more willing to use larger disks than
fdisk itself.
> When I installed my new 10 Gb hard disk one year ago, I entered fdisk
> expert mode since it seemed to be the only way to go beyond 8.4 Gb. I
> could then allocate the whole disk (and more as it turned out ;-).
This once again relates to the BIOS setting, if i am understanding you
correctly.
> Everything went OK, (except that 'fdisk -l' would complain, see
> http://www.linuxdoc.org/FAQ/Linux-FAQ/x3357.html#AEN3548) until one day
The URL would not accept the whole address or at least not when i tryed
with netscape,
http://www.linuxdoc.org/FAQ/Linux-FAQ does work, but i could not find the
question concerned.
> allocation of the last sectors of the disk were attempted (see my
> previous messages).
> When I repartitionned yesterday I had read the following in
> http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-2.html
> > For large IDE disks (over 8.4 GB): get a recent stable kernel (2.0.34 or later).
> > Usually, all will be fine now, especially if you were wise enough not to ask the
> > BIOS for disk translations like LBA and the like.
> The problem is that you don't have to ASK for LBA and the like : they
> are on by default on a new disk!
Ah!, well here it is, thesedays the bios handels things very differently.
> Actually I experienced that if I put LBA mode off in the setup (it had
> been on by default, on both of my disks, IBM and Fujitsu) fdisk would
> magically allow me to allocate space until the last of the 1232
> cylinders, without having to enter expert mode.
cfdisk now supports disks up to 500+ GBytes.
> The troubles were not over yet since after restoring the data, lilo
> (installed on disk MBR) did not work any more (and linear option in
> lilo.conf did not help, just changed "LI" into "L").
That will always happen its explained in the lilo README file in
/usr/doc/lilo-*.*
> The trick to have it work again was just to put back LBA mode on the
> setup!
> Now everything is fine (I hope...) : no error and this time fdisk is
> happy with the partitions it created.
I know now what you mean, i have had this problem before on older machines.
I now set my bios'es to "auto".
O yes, newer installations have fdisk-2.9v or higher.
Redhat 5.2 is rather old to say the least.
>
> Hope this will help someone.
I am sure it will help others with older motherbaords.
>
> Cheers,
>
--
Regards Richard
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://people.zeelandnet.nl/pa3gcu/
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